


Getting It Back

by carolinenite



Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: AU-- where Charlie doesn't die, F/M, February Challenge, newsroom fanfic challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-28
Updated: 2018-02-28
Packaged: 2019-03-24 23:50:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13822053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carolinenite/pseuds/carolinenite
Summary: When Charlie and Leona get stranded in DC by a hurricane, will the time together finally let them sort out the issues that have plagued them for fifty years?Written for lilacmermaid's February FanFic Challenge:  Weather!





	Getting It Back

Charlie Skinner stared through the bank of windows at the DC airport, taking in the weather outside, and shook his head sorrowfully.  He and Leona would certainly not be getting back to New York tonight, or tomorrow either, probably.  Leona was, to her credit, attempting to bribe the gate agent with several hundred dollar bills, but inevitably, she would blame him for the unavoidable delay.  Her chastisement would be related to the decision to fly commercially instead of privately.  Likely, it would also extend to ceding home-court advantage and travelling to DC for the week of meetings with their bureau and with the appropriate political figures.

On first instinct, Charlie thought to call Nancy, to let his wife know that he was stuck and not to expect him home.  As he pulled the phone from his pocket, he stared at the screen for a breath before moving from his initial instinct and onto finding himself and Leona shelter from the storm, someplace that wasn’t an airport terminal.  She had been gone for almost a year, but sometimes, he still heard her voice, calling him down for dinner, reminding him to check up on the girls, relentlessly demanding that he invite Will & Mac and Reese & Leona for Sunday supper more often.  The empty feeling wasn’t shrinking as the days passed, but the stabbing pain of the initial loss had faded into a dull, if consistent, ache.  Charlie shook his head lightly and refocused:  someplace to go when Leona invariably found that she couldn’t bribe the gate agent into smuggling them onto the (nonexistent) last plane out of Saigon—or DC—whichever analogy worked for them in this moment.

He tugged his readers out of his jacket pocket and pushed them up his nose, swiping his phone open and heading for the internet.  It took only moments before he realized that hotels were almost completely booked.  The storm had shut down not only the airports but also the railways. Everyone was stuck.  It was a long shot, but he dialed the Hay-Adams from memory.  Maybe, just maybe, the upper-crust were still trying to buy their way out.

“Yes, hi.  Good evening.  Do you have anything available for the next two nights?”  The concierge on the other end of the line paused before offering him the only room that wasn’t currently booked:  the Federal Suite.  “Yeah, alright.  The name?  Leona Lansing.”  At the sound of her name, she turned, but he shook his head at her.  “Great.  We’ll be there in an hour or so.”  He disconnected the call just as Leona turned and huffed her way back to him.

“We’re stuck, Chuck.”

“Looks that way.”  He turned his face toward the bank of windows again.  “Hurricanes tend to do that.”

“Do you think we can get someone to drive us?”

“The highways are closed.  It’s a real howler out there.”  She sighed at him then, the first truly human emotion that he had seen from her all day; she was clearly tiring.  “But, I did manage to get us a suite at the Hay-Adams.”

“I’m not sharing a suite with you, Skinner.”

“You are unless you’d like to take up residence at the Flea Bag Motel around the corner from the Disreputable Inn.” 

He held her gaze, and he watched her battle internally.  Making the only decision that made sense in the situation, she nodded, passing on the squabble for now.

“Does your grand plan also include a car to get us there?”

“They’re sending one.  Should be waiting by the time we get out there.”

It took them considerable time to wend their way through the throngs of stranded travelers, and the car was, Charlie noted with relief, waiting for them as they exited the airport.

“Mrs. Lansing?”  The driver stepped forward, hands outstretched to take her bags.  He dropped them quickly at the sight of her empty arms. 

“Our bags are…” she turned to Charlie, eyes wide.  “Charlie!  Our bags are on the plane!”

“Come on, Leona.”  He put a hand on her arm.  “Let’s just get there.”

Leona stepped off the curb, and the driver moved to open the door for her.  A town car, obviously packed with as many people as could cram into the seats, zoomed by, destination unknown.  It hit a large puddle as it passed, and the spray was instant and massive.  Leona threw up her arm to shield her face, but the damage was done.  She was soaked through.  Her mouth hung open for a brief moment before she turned to Charlie with rage in her eyes.

“I’ll sue him into next week.”  Charlie shrugged out of his jacket and draped it over her shoulders.  Gently, he nudged her into the car, while she continued to sputter indignantly.

 

As they checked-in to the Hay-Adams, Leona laid her credit card down with an affected sigh.  Charlie’s eyebrows climbed; he shrugged good-naturedly at her.

“You don’t pay me enough to afford a suite like that.” 

She rolled her eyes at him and addressed the concierge.

“Is there—is there anywhere open to get a dry set of clothes?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am.  Everything is closed because of the storm.  Even we’re running with a skeleton crew.  There are robes, though, in the rooms.”

“Well there,” Charlie laid a sympathetic hand on her shoulder, “you see?  You’ll be able to get dry.”  He felt her shivering under his jacket and squeezed her shoulder gently before withdrawing his hand and turning toward the elevators.

“You’d better send up a bottle of bourbon.”  Leona turned back as an afterthought.  “Something decent.  And dinner?  Is the kitchen open?”

“Barely,” the concierge said with an apologetic shrug.  “I’ll send up what they’re offering and a bottle of bourbon.”

Leona nodded her thanks and joined Charlie in the elevator.  Once they arrived at their floor, Charlie keyed into the room and held the door open for Leona to pass in front of him.  She set her purse on a table and glanced around the room for only a heartbeat before turning toward the bedroom.  When she emerged ten minutes later, her hair was mussed, obviously having been toweled to a drier state than when she had reached the hotel.  The robe was cinched around her waist, and she looked, to Charlie, small—so much more fragile then she appeared when she was running a board room.

“Well, Charlie, if I have to lounge in one of these fluffy monstrosities, you do, too.”  He hesitated for a moment.  “Hop to it, Chuckles.”

By the time he had successfully maneuvered the change into the bathrobe, noting with a smile her clothes hanging neatly in the shower, dripping, the dinner had arrived.  Charlie accepted the glass she held out to him with a smile.

“What have they sent us for dinner?”

“Something that could have come from the Marriott just as easily as the kitchen here,” she said with ill-concealed derision.

“Just drink through it.  We’ll survive.”

They ate as much of their dinner as seemed appropriate before retiring to the living room.  Charlie flipped the television on only to be met with static on the screen.  He continued on, searching for an internet television application, to no avail.

“Really?”  She raised her eyebrows at the screen.

“There’s nothing to be done for it.  The storm seems to be doing a full-on slaughter of entertainment.”  He looked around the room, smiling as he found a CD player.  “But, we have a saving grace.”  He crossed to the discs beside the machine.  “Standard, but not atrocious.  What do you think, Lee?  Kenny G or a little Sinatra?”  He had felt her gaze snap to him at the term of endearment, but he had continued sorting through the musical selection.  “Just slipped out.”  He did meet her gaze then.

“I don’t know how to do this anymore, Charlie.”  The words were quiet and matter-of-face; she sounded fully accepting of a reality that seemed, to her, unescapable.

“What do you mean?”  He felt certain that he knew what she meant, but he needed to hear her give voice to the thoughts.

“I don’t know how to let my guard down, how to be just a person without an agenda.”  She cast her eyes down and finished quietly, “I don’t remember how to love you.”

“I don’t know, kid.  You seem to be doing alright.”  She smiled tentatively at him, wanting desperately to believe his words.  “You’re wearing a bathrobe.  Feels a lot like, if nothing else, your guard is down.  And how can you have an agenda when there’s nothing that I would deny you?”

He inserted a disc and cross the room back to her.  As the music began, she shifted on the couch, making a space for him beside her.  He took the seat she had created for him, and she leaned closer, resting against his chest.  He knew that it was intentional, her being so physically close but facing away from him; avoiding eye contact made it easier to have the difficult conversations that loomed in front of them.

“I’m really good at my job.”  Charlie let the statement hang knowing that there would be more to follow.  “When we made the choice to pursue our own careers, this isn’t how I thought it would go, you know.  I figured that we’d part ways and set the world on fire for a while, and then we’d find our ways home again.”  Her fingers tangled with his, and she pressed a brief kiss to the back of his hand.  “And then Reese, and my parents, and getting married to Lansing, who had so much money that no one noticed that our son couldn’t possibly be ‘ours’.  Or the money bought their indifference, I don’t know.”  Her grip tightened.  “It wouldn’t matter now, but it DID then, and there weren’t other options.”  Charlie bit the inside of his cheek.  They had had this conversation a thousand times in the last 40 years, and he vehemently disagreed with her.  He had loved her enough to stand behind her choices, but he had never liked it.  This moment, though, was not the time to rehash it.  “Then,” she continued, “without warning—you found Nancy.  Christ, Charlie.  She was brilliant, just fucking incredible.  And the girls are revelations.  Katie’s family is gorgeous.  Sophie, well, a philosophy degree will eventually pay the bills.  With a brain like hers, I have no doubt about her success.  Nancy was everything that I couldn’t ever be for you.  She managed to have a phenomenal career, give you a family, be a wife, a fan-fucking-tastic one, it seemed.”  His free hand trailed up and down her arm, lazily and without intention.  The closeness of her drew him like a magnet, and he couldn’t _not_ touch her.  “So, I left you to live your life.  When my marriage ended, his infidelity was a perfect cover for the truth:  he was only searching out the love and attention that I couldn’t muster for him.  I threw myself into work, into being all of the things that I told you I was going to be.  And now, I own the 6 th largest media conglomeration in the world.  My son is brilliant but lost, and if I end up with a fourth-generation Rockette for a grandchild…”  She trailed off, losing the thread for a moment.  “Like I said, I don’t think I know how to do this anymore.  I think I’ve missed my chance.”

“You can’t have missed it, Leona.  Every single breath you take is you fighting for the things you want.  ACN.  Every acquisition AWM has ever made.  Reese carrying Lansing as a last name.”  She flinched, and he instantly regretted the barb.  “I’m sorry.  I only meant that you’re the toughest, most stubborn woman I’ve ever had the privilege to know.  There’s nothing you can’t have if you decide that you want it.”

“Nothing?”  Hopefulness crept into her voice.

“The world is your oyster.”  She turned in his arms then, eyes searching his face for the reassurance that maybe, just maybe, they hadn’t missed it all.  “Lee,” he whispered her name and traced his thumb down her cheek.  “We haven’t missed it.  It just took us longer to find our way back than either of us thought.  Reese is… Jesus, Leona.  It’s more than 50 years that we’ve been doing this dance.  You were 22 when you leveraged your parent’s company to buy Atlantis Media.  It only took you a year to expand from the radio markets to delivering foreign news coverage to the network new stations.”

“I know my resume, Charlie.  I’m the one who wrote it.”

“My point, if you’d care to let me make it, is that you’re everything you ever wanted to be.  You’re everything I ever dreamed you could be and more.  So, maybe, fifty years in, you could accept that ours wasn’t a linear trip, but that we’ve ended up, here, together.”

“Yeah,” a measure of sarcasm returned to her voice, “here, stuck in DC because you thought the optics of meeting the people where they live instead of summoning them were worth the trip.”

“You know, somehow I knew that this hurricane was going to end up being my fault.”  He continued stroking her arm.

“Not the storm, just the fact that we’re stuck in it.”  They sat silently for long moments, things unsaid hanging in the atmosphere around them.  “Where do we go from here?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean… you say that we haven’t missed it.  What does that mean moving forward?  Do we date?  God… I don’t want to date.  That sounds awful.  I don’t actually know what I mean.”

“Honey, I think the beauty of being this age is that we get to take the rules.  We’re too old to be governed by fear of dumb people.”

“I’m not too old for anything, you billy-goat.”

“You know what I mean.  We can do anything we want to do.  You don’t want to date?  Fine.  Let’s skip it and move right to living together.  We did alright this past week.  Didn’t we?  We survived in adjoining suites for the last 8 nights.   Took our meals together, worked around each other’s schedules.  Living together can’t be all that different.”

“What will we tell Reese?  Or your girls?”  She sounded hesitant, and Charlie knew that her doubts weren’t about him, weren’t about finally re-embarking upon a relationship so long kept at bay.  Her trepidation came from her own deep-seated insecurities, both about her past and about her failed marriage.  She ran the table in every aspect of her life, and if she needed him to take the reins in this instance, then he would do everything in his power to make this any easy transition for her.

“We’ll tell them the truth.  We were never unfaithful to our spouses.  We never broke our vows.”

“Well, not in the literal sense,” she interrupted.  He raised an eyebrow at her, and she continued.  “Do you remember the night that you found out Nancy was pregnant with Katie?”

“I got very, very drunk at your office.”

“Yeah.  You did.  Reese was almost five, and you cried in your bourbon for all the opportunities you felt like you were missing with him.”

“Truth be told, that wasn’t the first or last time that happened.”

“I know, and I think Nancy knew, too.”

“I feel like you’re probably right.  Nancy wasn’t stupid.”

“She certainly wasn’t.  When Sophie came along and you were afraid that she might be developing a crush on Reese, it was Nancy who called me to prop you up that weekend.  We may not have had sex in more than 40 years, but we’ve been more intimate than a lot of lovers.  If we didn’t break our vows, it’s only in name.  Our faithfulness… it’s only the letter of the thing.”  At her words, Charlie’s head dropped.  “She didn’t resent you for it,” Leona continued.  “We talked about it once.  She came to me, not long after Sophie started college and she told me that she didn’t, couldn’t, understand our relationship and that she knew we weren’t sleeping together, but she said she wasn’t naïve enough to think that either of us weren’t in some in way in love with the other.”

“She said what?”  His face and his tone betrayed incredulity.

“I told her that I had never seen a man more committed to being faithful to his wife that you were and that she had nothing to worry about from me.”  Leona’s eyes wrinkled in a wan smile.  “You’re misunderstanding me, is what she said.  I’m not warning you off my husband.  I’m thanking you for the parts of him that you carry.”  Leona paused and let’s Nancy’s words stand for a moment.  “She knew you, Charlie, knew what a complex man you are, and she didn’t want me to have guilt for something that she both understood and appreciated.”  He stared at her, trying to find words to respond.  “I didn’t tell you that to hurt you or so that you would think less of yourself as a husband.  I just want you to consider what our kids might have already sensed about us.”

“I’m sorry, Lee.  I never intended to put you in a position that you felt that we compromised our fidelity.  I tried… god, how I tried… I’m just… sorry.”

“We did the best we could with the hand that we dealt ourselves.”  She shrugged.  Their choices were their own, but the consequences reached far beyond the two of them.

“Do you think Reese knows?”

“Everything?”  Charlie nodded.  “I think he suspects.”  Charlie nodded again at her.  “He was never close to my husband.  They just never made great strides toward each other.  And when he compared that to how easily it always seemed to come for the two of you, I think he has an idea that you might just be more than a doting uncle.”

“Do you think he’ll ever be able to forgive us?”

“We did the best that we could.  We were so young, and it was a different time.”

“I think we were old enough to have behaved better.”  She opened her mouth to rebut but was silenced by a wave of his hand.  “It’s different for you.  You were there every day.  I had to watch from Connecticut.  Lansing had to have known, too, if we’re being honest.  Every time I came around, he left.  I swear to god, I don’t know that I ever spent more than fifteen minutes with the man in a stretch.  Ever.”

Leona laughed heartily, and Charlie waited for her mirth to subside.  While he wasn’t sure what had drawn forth the humor, her laugh was a sound that he had encountered all too infrequently over the course of the years.

“He left because he thought we were having an affair, and he used the opportunity to make time for his own indiscretions.”

“He WHAT?!” Charlie roared.  “All that time?”  She chuckled and nodded.  “I don’t know if it’s funny, Leona.”

“Well, it sure as shit isn’t tragic.”

“Can we return to the subject, please?  What the fuck are we going to tell our kids?”

“Weren’t you the one who was supposed to be figuring that out?”

“When did you turn into the comic relief around here, Father Flannigan?”

“When you started taking it too seriously.”

“Excuse me, but you were the one who couldn’t remember how to do this.”  He stared into her eyes.  “About ten minutes ago.”

“I guess I remembered.”

“You did?”  The hand that had been lightly wrapped around her arm tightened its grip on her.

“Who cares what we tell the kids or your grandkids.  This is our life.  I think we’ve lived by other people’s conventions long enough.”  She pressed a chaste kiss to his lips.  “I… Charlie, if I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t have done it the same way.  I’d still leave you to your life with Nancy, of course—I meant what I said about her giving you things that I never could—but, I wouldn’t deny you your son or him you.  I wouldn’t take away your chance to be what you should have been to each other.”

“Do you think it’s too late?  Do you think it would do more harm than good for him to know now?”

“If it’s what you want, and if you don’t think that the girls would go absolutely ballistic, then you should have that conversation with him.”

“He’s never going to forgive either of us.”

“Probably not.  But, do we really deserve it?”

It was the first time that she had acknowledged that their choices weren’t the right ones.  For Charlie, an immense weight felt as though it had been lifted from him.

“You’ve never… you’ve always contended…”  As he floundered, she took over.

“What was I going to do?   Blow up everything that we had compromised so colossally to get?  And then what?  Tell Nancy that she was right?  That not only did we share a son, but also that you were going to claim him as such?  What about your girls?  And AWM.  It wouldn’t never have survived the scandal in the early days.  We were locked into a bad decision.”

“So, we sacrificed Reese.”

“And if he ever does forgive us, it will be far more than we deserve.”

“We fucked it up pretty squarely.”  She nodded in response, tears swimming in her eyes.  “We’ve still got time… not as much as we used to, but some.  We can start getting it back.  Bring Reese inside; try to explain.  Tell the girls that they have the brother they always wanted.  Begin to move forward.”

“As a family?”

“We’ve always been a family, whether we called it that or not.”

“Together?”

“Never anything else, ever again.”

There was a loud pop, and the power went out.

“You know what?  I’ll never let you live down the time that you got us stranded in DC during a hurricane.”

“What good was the power doing us anyway?”

“I could see your face a minute ago.  That’s something.”

She shuddered as she felt his fingers toy with the neckline of her robe.

“We could move on from conversational pursuits to something more suited to the darkness.”  The tone of his voice told Leona all that she needed to know about Charlie’s intentions.

“Something more suited to the darkness?” she queried, aiming for coy and landing at breathless instead.

“Yeah,” he kissed her cheek and then captured her lips in a tender kiss that promised her everything.  She sighed, and her lips parted beneath his.  “Something in the dark,” he murmured the words against her collarbone as his fingers slid inside her robe.  “Though this is also a good daylight activity.  There are few things in life that I hold dearer than the memory of you in the daylight.”

“Charlie,” tension invaded her body, “it’s been a really long time since we’ve done this.  I don’t know what you think you remember, but it almost certainly doesn’t look that way any longer.”

“Lee, I’m not saying this so that you’ll remove your fingernails from my wrist, and let me get back to touching you, honestly.  But, you’ve never, in fifty years, had any reason to doubt the level of desire that I have for you.  If you’ll let me now, I’ll prove it to you all over again.”  He shifted against her so that she could feel him, hard against her.

“Charlie Skinner, you old dog.”

“Not sold old tonight, it seems.”

“Kiss me, Charlie.  Make me remember.”

“We never forgot, honey.”

 

The storm raged outside; powerlines crashed to the ground around the city, and the newsmen predicted that the city would be shut down for days.  For the first time in many, many years, neither Charlie nor Leona were worried about the world around them.  Their world, for the time being, focused solely on them, on trying to compress years of missed moments into the span of a few heartbeats.  Leona would never let Charlie forget the time that they got stuck in DC for a hurricane; she had never been more grateful for anything in her life, with the single exception of when he gave her her son… their son.

**Author's Note:**

> A couple of things:
> 
> Okay, before anyone goes out there and decides that I’m just WRONG about Reese’s age, or Leona’s, or Charlie’s ages, let me just say: I fudged with the ages. Messina is 43; Fonda is 80, and Waterston is 77. So… for the purposes of this—Reese is 47, and Leona and Charlie are 73 and 75 respectively. Bridging that gap a little just worked for what I was doing—can we please let it slide?
> 
> Next, I've been so fully blocked, y'all. Seriously, it's taken me a full month to get one fluffy challenge piece in the can, and I'm still not feeling like I've got my groove back. I know that I'm still overdue on the (smutty) epilogue of Something There. It will happen eventually, I promise. Just stick with me, alright? I feel not too awful about my lack of progress given all of the amazing content that has been going up over the last while--- you people really are fan-freaking-tastic!
> 
> Finally, thank you so much for reading! This is my first go at Charlie/Leona, and it's a delicate balance between vulnerable!Leona and kickass!Leona, but I really feel like she's got both in her. I hope you enjoyed this piece, and I would LOVE to hear from you!


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